Tessa Fisher recently presented her work on the plausibility of detecting life on water worlds, exoplanets with much more water than Earth, a the Habitable Worlds 2017 meeting held in Lamarie WY. As quoted by New Scientist Tessa's presentation "sent ripples through the conference" due to the provocative idea that exoplanets rich in water may not be the best places to search for life. Read the full article here. And, another article on the research at Nature News here. Way to go Tessa!

A new theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A features work pushing the frontier of origin of life research! The volume on Re-Conceptualizing the Origins of Life is edited by Sara Walker together with George Cody (Carnegie Institution) and emerged from a workshop held at Carnegie with the same name in 2015. You can read the intro to the volume by Walker, Cody and Norman Packard here or read many of the excellent contributions to the volume.